


Simultaneity: II

by afogocado



Series: Past and Parallel Lives [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, F/M, Friendship, Romance, professor!matt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 16:16:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4967725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afogocado/pseuds/afogocado
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve always found comfort in the familiar. So much so that you crave the sickening feeling of déjà vu and those who elicit that unshakable feeling somewhere deep inside of you. </p><p>In which, the reader and Matt Murdock meet in past and future lives or parallel lives. Sometimes the reader ends up with Matt and sometimes they don’t. Some of these will end or begin in smut and sometimes there will be no smut. </p><p>Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to Netflix Daredevil and Marvel or any other major work that I reference. This is purely for entertainment purposes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simultaneity: II

**Author's Note:**

> So continues our collection of inappropriate relationships. In which, Matt has gone into professing philosophy instead of practicing law, and you are a graduate student taking classes and working as an interdepartmental temp. Try not to get into too much trouble. (Reader is in mid-20's and Matt is in early/mid 30s).

\---  
II: 2015

\---

1

When you catch your breath after running up four flights of stairs, you shuffle around the corner and slow your breathing significantly. Nobody is around to witness this, thank God. Your pulse returns to normal. You feel like a mess inside this place, almost like a disheveled monstrosity. The inside of the building looks like a library and it is immaculate. There are bookshelves lining walls in the halls and the exposed brick with ivy crawling its way up is very charming to you. The ceilings are high and the windows are massive. Outside the windows is a perfect New England rainy day. Fog is even rolling in at a distance. You pop the collar of your pullover, tugging it against your neck when you feel cold, and then check the room number scribbled down on your palm. Most of the ink has sweat off by now despite it being a chilly day out.

You’re supposed to be going to room 411—this is where your office or cubicle or whatever will be. Your assistantship as the interdepartmental temp has you situated directly in the middle of the roundabout floor. It makes sense to the departments you’ll work with, but not to you. You’ve been told the way the rooms and room numbers in the Humanities building has been arranged extends far beyond any kind of reasonable comprehension and that its chaos only makes sense to the scatterbrained professors. 

Three departments share the fourth floor and though it’s a pain in the ass to get all the way up here (each staircase is at a ninety-one degree angle, your thighs have asserted), it’s worth it. There is a coffee house on the first floor and apart from it being loud with chatty and screaming undergraduates early in the morning, the sounds of the kitchen and everything else about it is too much. Floors two and three can hear the sounds all too well, but not the fourth, even though the smells of burnt bagels and cheese manage to waft up there every now and again. 

This morning, your stomach churns and burns, probably from the liquor you were drinking last night. You know you’re hung-over now, but you wonder if you could possibly still be drunk. The way you stagger around the corner and press your hand against one of the exposed brick walls makes you wonder if you possibly are. Or maybe it’s just vertigo from being nervous. You grimace and berate yourself for having not drank enough water last night and this morning. Hell, you knew you’d be nervous today, hence the drinking, but you didn’t think you’d feel this unsettled by now. 

You rub your face briskly with your hands and walk blindly down the hall and by the time you pull your hands away, it’s too late, and you’re colliding with the first poor soul you’ve come this close to all morning. 

“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry,” you start babbling. “Here, let me help you.” You whip your head around in several directions and notice that absolutely no one else is around. Must all be in class. 

You stoop to gather up papers and a couple of books the man had been carrying. Your curiosity allows you to eye some of the pages and find that it’s printed in Braille. 

Awesome job, [Y/N], you just ran down a blind man, you asshole. One of the fake plants situated in a nearby reading corner glares at you for your impudence. You shoot it a I’m trying my best now, dammit look. 

“I’m so sorry, again, mister. Jesus.”

When you’re both standing upright again, he chuckles and runs a hand through his neatly cropped hair. It falls back into place perfectly. “Hello to you, too.” He speaks quickly and he has a mellow sort of voice. You can hear it rumbling from deep inside his chest, but what comes out is a kind tone. He grins, “Mister?” He chuckles softly. 

You spy his white cane on the floor and pick that up, as well, handing it to him. Your fingers brush when you make sure that he grabs it and you blush, thankful he can’t see. Asshole!

“Do you need a hand carrying that other stuff?” You offer because his stack of books and papers are haphazard under his free arm and it looks uncomfortable. 

The corner of a thicker volume is stabbing him in the armpit through his thin (well-fitting) Henley shirt. It is unbuttoned all the way and you can see some of his dark chest hair poking through. In fact, it doesn’t seem like there’s a stopping point in between his beard and chest hair. You’re so close that you can see all kinds of stubbed dark hair sprinkled from his jaw, down his throat, and to where his shirt is open.

“No, but I appreciate the offer.” His grip tightens around the stack and he situates his cane in his other hand. “You’re new. I don’t remember ever hearing you around here before.”

“Yeah, I’m [Y/N] [L/N]. I’m the new grad assistant for the academic year.”

“Oh!” He sounds eager and you feel at ease. “Yeah, you’ll actually be doing a fair bit of things for me. It just isn’t in any of the department’s budgets this year to hire as many work study students that we usually get to have around. So I know doing what they do alongside your other duties will keep you maybe too busy.” His mouth drops in a sympathetic grimace. “I’ll try to be good to you.”

You smile slightly. You knew you’d be taking on quite a bit this year alongside trying to handle the first year of your master’s program. “Well, busy is good.”

“You are working on the whole floor, right?” He waves his cane around in the directions of the hall. “Not just Philosophy?”

“No, yeah. I’ll be there, Humanities, and English. Where are you placed?”

“Philosophy.”

“What do you do? I mean your specialization--?” 

He laughs. “Oh, uh, a little bit of everything. But they mainly stick me with ethics? I get a lot of pre-law students.” He doesn’t really pause for the next part, “You’re actually kind of assigned to me.” His voice let that end on an upward inflection. 

“Yeah?” You got a bit of the job description during your phone interview and would be getting more details this morning. 

“Yeah. A lot of like, basic office things? Stuffing scantrons materials in the machine, making copies.”

“I think I may be able to do that.” You hope he catches your humorous tone. 

He chuckles again. It’s almost a breathless sound. “Well, I guess you need to be getting along, right?”

“Yeah. It was nice meeting you.”

He hasn’t stopped smiling. “Likewise.”

“But you didn’t tell me your name.”

“Oh. It’s ah, Murdock. Matthew.” He places the bottom of his cane in between his shoes, balancing it against his fit front and offers you his right hand. 

You shake his hand, “Sorry about all that again. It was nice meeting you, Dr. Murdock.”

His grip tightens, “Please. Matthew.”

You nod and smile at him. Somewhere a clock tower rings quarter til. You check your watch. The 8am classes are about to let out. 

“I have a nine o’clock,” he says. “Have a great first day. And welcome.”

You thank him again and watch him head towards the elevators with ease and poise. You turn around, ready to head for 411 when your gaze catches on the plant again. 

“What?” You ask it. “He’s just a nice guy.”  
\---

2

Your first week is totally busy and daunting and exhausting. One of the assistants in the English department tells you not to worry because it’s only the first week and things should calm down a little bit before the Fall Break. Apart from trying to adjust, you spend so much time trying to be less awkward. It doesn’t work at times because you spend the first few days doing a lot of clumsy and embarrassing things. 

You collide with people on a daily basis because halls are crowed and it’s hard for you to look at where you’re going, especially when other people are too busy looking at cellphones in their hands and instead of in front. The best day is the day you run into a very tall dude carrying a very hot hazelnut latte. 

(“Did…did you wash your hair in hazlenut scented shampoo? Is that even a thing in the market for toiletries?” Dr. Murdock asked that morning. 

“I made a new friend this morning and they liked me so much they let me have their latte.”

He grinned wide. “Ran into another one, huh?”

“Of course.”

He just smiled.)

But Dr. Murdock was right about you being with him most of the time. His classes are mainly lectures or seminars, but the students still had to read for them and your job was to help him track down articles and things to either make into PDFs and print for the students or to upload them onto the school’s academic website that they can log into and do homework and readings on. He uses a MacBook in his office and while the Accessibility settings help him tremendously, there are a lot of materials and things around campus that aren’t as accessible to him as they could be. 

Helping Dr. Murdock is one of your favorite aspects of the job because whenever it’s a Murdock Day, you get to spend most of your shift in his office and he lets you do readings or work on papers that are due soon, as well as working for him. Most of the time, you can finish everything he needs you to do for him in a sufficient and slightly quick enough way that you usually have a couple of hours left at the end of your work day. But he lets you stick around. And he vouches for you whenever someone asks about your productivity when you’ve not been seen around all day. 

He likes you to stick around and do your homework or assignments because he wants you to read everything to him. 

“Dr. Murdock?” 

“Please, [Y/N], I’ve told you that you may call me Matthew. Or Matt.” He’s sitting upright at his desk, book propped open in front of him. 

You know this, but it’s hard for you to call him anything other than his professing title. You have this issue with other professors who insist upon you calling them by their first name. You’ve found in the month and half being here that graduate school is enormously different than undergraduate and most of it has to do with the relationship you have with the faculty. They say that in graduate school, your relationship to professors is more so on a colleague level than student/teacher. You think maybe you’ll have an easier time sliding into the mode of calling them all by their first names when you have your first semester or first year under your belt. You’ve even been invited to dinners and symposiums held at other professors’ homes. You’ve declined all of them, even the one at Dr. Murdock’s apartment of which peers have told you is bland and dim at best, but he is an entertaining host all the same. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you ever went to one.

“Yes,” is all you say. “I got everything up on Blackboard for you.”

“Thank you, [Y/N]. When is your class? Sorry, I forget.” He nudges his glasses up his nose with a slight touch from his curled index finger. 

“Four. It’s a little after noon now.” You noticed early on in the first few of these visits that he didn’t have a wall clock or anything like that other than the talking alarm clock that goes off right before his own classes. You remembered to start wearing that wristwatch an old friend got you a long time ago. “I’m trying to get through this reading. Is that okay?”

He smiled and relaxed into his chair. “Yes.” He laces his fingers in between one another and rests his hands on his abdomen. 

Today he’s wearing a light teal colored shirt with a striped tie. It doesn’t match. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t match. The sleeves are rolled up and from the couch adjacent to his desk, you can see just how thick with dark hair his forearms are. You feel yourself flush. You swallow hard. 

“What are you reading?” He can never stay on task for very long when you’re in here with him. 

He does much better when you both leave his office door open. Today it is shut. He doesn’t want to be disturbed. You wonder if there’s something else, as well. You know that the building wraps around itself like a panopticon and you can see someone else’s office window facing his own. It’s like Rear Window and you always feel watched when you’re in this building and especially in his office, even though you never do anything. You’ve never really thought of doing anything here, either. 

Right?

“DeLillo.” You’re always surprised at how you can find your voice. 

He nods, then raises his eyebrows, “Postmodern? Yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you know him?”

“Not personally.” He flashes you a cheeky grin. His laugh lines show off and you melt in a way. “Titles, mostly. The further you go into your specialty in anything, the less time you have to learn about anything else.” He runs his hands through his hair. You wonder if this is what dying feels like. His clipped sentences then long sentences are like this strange and irregular heartbeat that your body has taken a fancy to wearing these day. 

You don’t think about doing anything in here, my ass. You tell yourself. Stop it, you’re worse than that fucking fern out there. You’re sure the fern is glaring at you through the concrete wall, goddammit. 

You also wonder when these sorts of feelings started to happen. You’re aware of the dreams started having about him lately. They mostly happen on the nights before coming into work so it’s been getting difficult to be around him earlier on in the mornings. Or, you dream about him when you haven’t seen him and when you’re anticipating seeing him again. You try to spend time in other departments for the first few hours of the morning after these dreams because you can feel your cheeks burning the whole walk to campus. If he’s noticed this pattern, he hasn’t said anything. And you hope he doesn’t bring anything up. It isn’t like you can use the excuse of either of you having classes during those early hours because they’re all later in the day. 

You don’t know when these flushing feelings started, you just know that some mornings it’s hard to come into work. 

“I have to be gone by three,” he breaks you out of your reverie. 

“Fair enough.”

“Read, dear scholar.” His mouth is turned up in mirth. 

You stare as his tongue darts out and traces a line over his red lips. (Why are your lips always engorged, Dr. Murdock?) He does this a lot. You want to chuck chapstick at his head to make him stop. But you don’t want him to stop because the twist in your stomach you get over his nuances like this is something you actually look forward to. This ennui is unbearable, but he is not. 

You grip your book tightly. The pages stick to your sweat as you thumb through to find your spot. “Okay, I’m kind of in the middle of it here:

“There's a theory about déja vu."

"I don't want to hear it."

"Why do we think these things happened before? Simple. They did happen before, in our minds, as visions of the future. Because these are precognitions, we can't fit the material into our system of consciousness as it is now structured. This is basically supernatural stuff. We're seeing into the future but haven't learned how to process the experience. So it stays hidden until the precognition comes true, until we come face to face with the event. Now we are free to remember it, to experience it as familiar material."

"Why are so many people having these episodes now?"

"Because death is in the air," he said gently. "It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven't learned about ourselves. Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven't known how to make the material surface. Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.'"

“Do you believe in all this stuff?” He cuts in. He’s rolling his sleeves back down to his wrists and buttoning them shut.  
The clouds have obscured what natural light was coming in through his window facing the quad. You see ant-sized students and other university people running for shelter from the rain you can’t quite see yet.

“Just because I read something doesn’t mean I believe in it. I’m sure you feel the same way about your own discourses.”

“Fair.” He presses his hands upon his desk and pushes himself up. He strides over to the window behind his desk and shuts it. “Too chilly.” 

As soon as he shuts and locks the window, that’s when the rain hits hard, belting against the glass. You wonder if there’s hail too because rain shouldn’t be that powerful. He smiles, “Got it just in time.” 

You smile back. It’s darker in here now, especially with his office door closed and obscuring any light coming in from the hall. You shiver. 

He comes over to the couch you’re sitting on and tugs at a sweater that has fallen down the crack. He sits beside you after pulling the sweater over his head. His shoulder bumps yours, but he doesn’t move away. He trembles slightly and you can hear his teeth clack. 

“But, yeah, I do believe in déjà vu. Do you?” You’re surprised at being able to speak. 

He takes his glasses off his face, folds them, and sits them upon his knee. He rubs his face briskly. You side-eye him and see the dark bags under his eyes. He turns his head to look towards you, but it looks like he’s gazing at the window, or slightly above it. “I do.” He doesn’t speak for a while and you don’t continue reading. “I thought I knew you when I met you.”

Your heartbeat picks up. You hold your breath for several seconds before letting it out slowly so as to calm your pulse.

“I knew that you weren’t here before. But, when I heard you and when I shook your hand, it was like saying help to an old friend. Kind of.”

You sit your book aside and turn to face him, finally. You bite back a laugh. His hair is sticking up in all directions after putting the sweater on. 

“What is it??”

“It’s just. Hold still.” You reach over and smooth his hair, running your fingers in the directions of how it’s usually parted. You can smell his aftershave and it’s a divine and clean smell. It’s fresh and comforting and makes you want to curl up on a bed with blankets that smell like it.

You see him swallow hard. His Adam’s apple bobs, almost gets stuck in a deep spot. He leans back into the couch again, his shoulder pressing closer into yours. “Thank you.” He lets out something that sounds like a partial sigh and a partial laugh. 

“I—I have to go, Dr. Murdock.” You grab your book and spring to your feet, leaving his office and shutting the door behind you. 

 

3

 

You’re still up a little before midnight following a long day of work and classes because you have a last minute discussion assignment that you must post on the class’s webpage by midnight. Then you receive an email from a gmail account:

[Y/N],

I hope I didn’t scare you away earlier today. Sorry to write so late. I’m assuming you may be passed out from class. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before coming into work tomorrow. If it helps, whatever you need to do for me can wait until Monday. I don’t know how much you need to do for everyone else. I’m sorry, but it seems like I take up a lot of your time. I don’t mean to, and I realize that this sounds like I’m asking for pity, but I don’t know how to write it any other way. Sorry to ramble on in your inbox. Come in tomorrow if you feel like it. If not, please enjoy your weekend and see you Monday. 

Yrs,  
-M

You let out a shaking sigh. Why would he be writing you this late? Why would he be writing you with an email not affiliated with the university? His personal email? Because he didn’t want IT to know that he was contacting you outside of sanctioned hours and sanctioned email accounts? 

Matthew, 

No problem. Just needed some air. I’ll see you tomorrow because I’ll need to use your printer, haha. 

Best, 

[Y/N]

You finished your class assignment and then had another email.

[Y/N],

I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well. 

-M

 

Well, fuck. 

 

4

Foggy Nelson works in the English department and for more than half the things he asks you to make reproductions of, you’re sure is violating some copyright law in place somewhere. Professor Nelson isn’t worried. He teaches far too many creative writing and poetry classes. He doesn’t have time to worry about copyright issues when he’s more focused on capturing plagiarists and sending them to the Dean. 

“One time, this kid straight up copied the plot line of a Dragon Age game. A Dragon Age game, [Y/N].” His fists are clenched and he shakes them above his head. 

“Sounds awful.” You’re not sure what Dragon Age is, but apparently in Foggy’s opinion it was the worst. 

“Thank you. So then the kid was all aw naw man I didn’t copy that. It came to me in a dream. Bull…shit? And I wasn’t even the one who caught it right off the bat! Someone in the class was talking about it sounding like a videogame. So double-checking all these little fuckers’ pieces is a pain in the ass. I hope I get a sabbatical soon. How’s Matt?”

All of this was spoken so quickly, you don’t know how he had the time to drain his coffee while telling you about Dragon Age boy. 

“Matt? Oh, Dr. Murdock.”

“Oh, my God, [Y/N], it’s really okay. You can call us all by our actual names. The name police aren’t going to come take you away.” He shakes his elegant hair out of his face and goes to pour himself another cup of coffee from the pot resting on a bookshelf leaning dangerously and unstably against a nearby table. It’s October and he has nothing but pumpkin spiced coffee and tea things littering his tables and shelves.

“He’s fine. I think some students are frustrated with him. Something about them not having enough assignments to make sure they have a good grade or something like that.”

“Whatever. They need to suck it up. We can’t all be in my workshops and write a zillion pages a week.” He sips more coffee and motions for you to drink some too. “Did I ever tell you my mom wanted me to be a butcher?”  
“Oh, my god, Professor Nelson. How are you and Dr. Murdock friends?”

“We were roommates and are from the same city. He had a pretty infamous dad. Boxer. Has he told you about him yet?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry, he will. And he tells the stories about his dad better than I can.”

“But you tell stories for a living.” You elbow at him and he slaps playfully back at you. 

“I do. But Matty’s great at that, too.”

“What makes you think he’ll tell me something so personal?”

Professor Nelson’s grin slipped off his face as he contemplated something. Then he comes back to you. “He likes your voice.”

 

5

 

You’re in Matt’s office near the end of the semester in December. Final examinations, papers, and projects kick up next week. 

“What are you working on? Your pencil has been scratching that page for ages.” Matt yawns and stretches from behind his desk. 

“It’s like a list of all these things we shouldn’t be doing. And they’re not good and they’re not bad either. I can’t categorize what exactly it is we’re doing, but I’m sure for the most part, it’s wrong.”

“Can you provide me with an example? Because I don’t think enjoying the conversations I have with you and drinking coffee together is exactly against the law?” He’s crossing his arms in a way that looks like he’s hugging himself tightly. Trying to keep something in. 

Behind his window, it is black outside. You can see your reflection in the glass and the bare trees behind the pane. Snow is flitting about in swirls. 

“I can give you lots of examples. I have a list.” You hold up your small, pocket sized notebook with the tiny bicycles all over it. You wave it around for good measure, even though you know he can’t see it. 

He smiles wildly. “Please read it to me.” He reaches for his paper cup. A tea bag string is hanging lazily off the side. “What else do you have in there? Verses?”

“None of your business.” You know he can hear the mirth behind your chiding. “One, this specific instance isn’t written down. I’ll tell you, Professor Murdock…”

“Professor Murdock,” he chuckles slightly. “Please. You know better than that. You write out my first name in your messages to me.”

You roll your eyes, “I’m trying to tell you about a thing, Professor Murdock.”

He grins and waves his hand in a way to tell you to continue. That he will behave himself. You go on, “It’s well past ten o’clock right now and no one should be in this building except for the people cleaning it.”

“That is such a sin. You know. I think I have my rosary around here somewhere?” He starts messing the papers around on his desk as though he’s really looking for it and opens a drawer for good measure. “How many Our Fathers?”

You throw the little eraser nub from your pencil at him. It bonks him in the head and he frowns while you go on, “To continue, I am laying out on the couch by your desk, as though it’s the couch in my own apartment. You are sitting at your desk with your feet propped up on it and your hands are folded in your lap. You’re looking at me. I don’t know, but this could be a compromising image for someone to walk in on?”

“If I could see, I’d be looking at you, I’m sure. But I’m not looking at you. I have my ear angled towards you.”

It’s your turn to chuckle, “Your ear always so intimately follows the sound of my voice.”

“I like to hear you talk. I’ll pray for forgiveness for that later. And anyway, there still are people around. Those let out of late classes. You had a late class.”

“Yes, but you didn’t.”

“I’m working late.”

“You have to be out by ten-thirty. It’s eleven.”

“I was waiting for you to get out of class so I could make sure you got home safely.”

“That’s inappropriate.” You regret saying this as soon as it’s uttered because the tone is hostile and cold and clipped and so not like anything you’ve ever said to him before. You see him recoil a bit and he frowns. 

He doesn’t say anything for a while. He taps the tips of his fingers on his MacBook’s keys, not typing, but clacking. Finally, “I care whether or not everyone gets home safely,” and he furrows his brows. You feel really bad for snapping at him like that.

“Put on a record,” he says lightly. “I’ll be finished here soon.”

“I won’t.” But you get up anyway because you feel sick to your stomach and that something’s changed. You thumb through the sleeves by one of the many bookshelves in here. 

You dare to look out the door’s window and see a few people still milling about in the front hall. They have book bags slung over shoulders and are laughing in spite of their exhaustion and having been there all day. You worry someone may turn their head towards his door and see you through the small window. 

“They’re all just making plans to go drink beer somewhere within the hour,” he says this quietly, pulling the ear bud out of his ear.

“How do you know that? I can’t hear anything and I’m standing closer to the door than you are.”

“It’s just what people do on Thursday nights here, right?”

You agree and put Nick Drake on. You sit back down on the couch because your legs cannot support yourself and you start reading for a class.

“I have another email,” he says halfway through the record, pulling the ear bud back out for a minute. “Someone isn’t happy about there only being two exams in one of my classes. I’m going to remind them about the final drop date. Which is Friday.” 

“But aren’t all your classes like that?”

“Yes, and I make it very clear on the first day what the expectations are. I’d assign them papers to write if I could read them, but I thought people hated writing papers anyway.”

Matt teaches three classes: two undergraduate and a graduate seminar. All of the credit earned in the courses came from oral participation in the discussion over texts, midterm and final exams on scantrons, and a final one-one-one meeting that consists of the student providing a recitation of a major passage from an assigned text and his on-the-spot questions about the passage and text as a whole. 

“When we email each other, we use our personal email addresses and not the university’s.” You blurt this out. 

“Excuse me?” He fingers fall away from his computer. He was about to dictate an email.

“I’m just continuing telling you about the inappropriate things we do.”

“What, do you want me to stop emailing you?” Now it was his turn to sound curt. 

You aren’t quite indignant yet, but you sit your book in your lap and puff up a bit, “I just think if someone ever knew that, they would think it’s so weird that—”

“Do you want me to stop talking to you? Do you want to stop coming around?”

“No, Matthew, it’s none of those things. I just don’t think you’ve realized what I’ve realized!”

“Which is what? That I make you uncomfortable? What is it [Y/N]?”

“That sooner or later, people are going to start talking about us!” You’re standing now and you’ve thrown your book on his floor. “We are together all the time, Matt! Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“I don’t think it’s weird that I like spending time with you! I like you, [Y/N].” He’s standing now, too. “You’ve even told me yourself how hard it is for you to find people who understand you. I get that. I feel like you get me.”

You want to tell him that’s not fair to use that in this conversation, but it was true. You’ve latched onto him and next to none of your classmates. “It’s not just that. It’s just that…I don’t…I mean…I don’t have the words?”

He walks around his desk, fingertips brushing around the edges and corners until he knows he’s standing in front of you. He speaks in a near whisper. “I know. And I know that something is going on between us. And it’s a strange and dangerous dance. But I don’t think we’ve done anything to arouse suspicions. We’ve been very careful. I feel paranoid at times. That everyone knows I think about you in the middle of the night, which is why I have to send you an email. But we’ve never called each other, texted each other, sent compromising things. We’ve never gone home with one another.”

“Foggy knows about us.” You hate to point this out because you know they’re friends and you’re not trying to insinuate that his (and yours, really) only confidante would betray either or both of you.

“And Foggy will stick up for us if that ever needs to happen. Until the, we’ll continue doing what we’re doing. If that’s all right with you.”

And it is. And you do.


End file.
